Video: IDB's Luis Alberto Moreno at #BRAVObiz 2017

Friday, November 3, 2017

Speakers

Luis Alberto Moreno, President, IDB

Andrés Gluski, President and CEO, The AES Corporation; Chairman, AS/COA

Latin America can't miss the digital revolution the same way it missed industrial revolution in the past, said International Development Bank (IDB) President Luis Alberto Moreno. His keynote at the 2017 Council of the Americas Symposium focused on the ways public-private partnerships can help reduce the region's digital and development gap. "Governments know they will not be able to compete and generate the jobs of the future if they don't improve infrastructure and productivity. But governments also know they cannot close this gap on their own. They know they need resources, talent, and the ingenuity that is the basis of the private sector," he said.

Moreno also presented the IDB's new initiative for the private sector, BID Invest, which helps companies to fully participate in sustainable development while expanding their business in Latin America. He talked about how the bank gave multilateral assistance in Chile to allow the private sector to build its first large-scale solar farm in the country. "We have the local knowledge and the experience to make these sort of bets," he said, inviting business leaders to work with the BID, as the development bank is known in Spanish, when pursuing to push into underserved markets.